Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language

Week 7: Child Language : Concepts and Vocabulary
Language acquisition is not only inherently interesting; studying it is one way to look for concrete answers to questions that permeate cognitive science: Modularity. Do children learn language using a "mental organ," some of whose principles of organization are not shared with other cognitive systems such as perception, motor control, and reasoning (Chomsky, 1975, 1991; Fodor, 1983)? Or is language acquisition just another problem to be solved by general intelligence, in this case, the problem of how to communicate with other humans over the auditory channel (Putnam, 1971; Bates, 1989)? Human Uniqueness. A related question is whether language is unique to humans. At first glance the answer seems obvious. Other animals communication with a fixed repertoire of symbols, or with analogue variation like the mercury in a thermometer. But none appears to have the combinatorial rule system of human language, in which symbols are permuted into an unlimited set of combinations, each with a determinate meaning. On the other hand, many other claims about human uniqueness, such as that humans were the only animals to use tools or to fabricate them, have turned out to be false. Some researchers have thought that apes have the capacity for language but never profited from a humanlike cultural milieu in which language was taught, and they have thus tried to teach apes language-like systems. Whether they have succeeded, and whether human children are really "taught" language themselves, are questions we will soon come to. Language and Thought. Is language simply grafted on top of cognition as a way of sticking communicable labels onto thoughts (Fodor, 1975; Piaget, 1926)? Or does learning a language somehow mean learning to think in that language? A famous hypothesis, outlined by Benjamin Whorf (1956), asserts that the categories and relations that we use to understand the world come from our particular language, so that speakers of different languages conceptualize the world in different ways. Language acquisition, then, would be learning to think, not just learning to talk. This is an intriguing hypothesis, but virtually all modern cognitive scientists believe it is false (see Pinker, 1994a). Babies can think before they can talk (Chapter X). Cognitive psychology has shown that people think not just in words but in images (see Chapter X) and abstract logical propositions (see the chapter by Larson). And linguistics has shown that human languages are too ambiguous and schematic to use as a medium of internal computation: when people think about "spring," surely they are not confused as to whether they are thinking about a season or something that goes "boing" -- and if one word can correspond to two thoughts, thoughts can't be words. But language acquisition has a unique contribution to make to this issue. As we shall see, it is virtually impossible to show how children could learn a language unless you

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assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start. The scientific study of language acquisition began around the same time as the birth of cognitive science, in the late 1950's. We can see now why that is not a coincidence. The historical catalyst was Noam Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior (Chomsky, 1959). At that time, Anglo-American natural science, social science, and philosophy had come to a virtual consensus about the answers to the questions listed above. The mind consisted of sensorimotor abilities plus a few simple laws of learning governing gradual changes in an organism's behavioral repertoire. Therefore language must be learned, it cannot be a module, and thinking must be a form of verbal behavior, since verbal behavior is the prime manifestation of "thought" that can be observed externally. Chomsky argued that language acquisition falsified these beliefs in a single stroke: children learn languages that are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, and they do so without explicit instruction or any other environmental clues to the nature of such principles. Hence language acquisition depends on an innate, species-specific module that is distinct from general intelligence. Much of the debate in language acquisition has attempted to test this once-revolutionary, and still controversial, collection of ideas. The implications extend to the rest of human cognition.

Nativist theories
Nativist theories hold that children are born with an innate propensity for language acquisition, and that this ability makes the task of learning a first language easier than it would otherwise be. These "hidden assumptions" [2] allow children to quickly figure out what is and isn't possible in the grammar of their native language, and allow them to master that grammar by the age of three. [3] Nativists view language as a fundamental part of the human genome, as the trait that makes humans human, and its acquisition as a natural part of maturation, no different from dolphins learning to swim or songbirds learning to sing. Chomsky originally theorized that children were born with a hard-wired language acquisition device (LAD) in their brains. He later expanded this idea into that of Universal Grammar, a set of innate principles and adjustable parameters that are common to all human languages. According to Chomsky, the presence of Universal Grammar in the brains of children allow them to deduce the structure of their native languages from "mere exposure". Much of the evidence supporting the nativist position is based on the early age at which children show competency in their native grammars, as well as the ways in which they do (and do not) make errors. Infants are born able to distinguish between phonemes in minimal pairs, distinguishing between bah and pah, for example. Young children (under the age of three) do not speak in fully formed sentences, instead saying things like 'want cookie' or 'my coat.' They do not, however, say things like 'want my' or 'I cookie,' statements that would break the syntactic structure of the Phrase, a component of universal grammar. Children also seem remarkably immune

which Nativists say would not be the case if children were learning from their parents. Chomsky (1965) set out an innate language schema which provides the basis for the child’s acquisition of a language. a language acquisition model requires a number of components. which asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language. Finally. Equipped with this endowment. Given this poverty of the stimulus. the LAD concept is a component of the nativist theory of language which dominates contemporary formal linguistics. Firstly. language acquisition). Fourthly.[ The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language (ie. Chomsky argues that in this way.F. Skinner's behavioral psychology which emphasized principles of learning theory such as classical and operant conditioning and imitation over biological predisposition. acquiring a knowledge of language. the input signals received) and the degenerate nature (frequent incorrect usage. The interactionist theory of Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget later emphasized the importance of the interaction between biological and social (nature and nurture) aspects of language acquisition. (2) The device then tests the compatibility using the knowledge of implications of each hypothesis for the sentences. secondly. first language learning is explained as performed by a Language Acquisition Device progressing through the following stages: (1) The device searches the class of language structure hypotheses and selects those compatible with input signals and structural information drawn from the PLD. there must be some initial delimitation of the class of possible language structure hypotheses. Thirdly. The acquisition process takes place despite the limited nature of the primary linguistic data (PLD. At the time it was conceived (1957–1965). (3) One hypothesis or ‘grammar’ is selected as being compatible with the PLD. the LAD concept was in strict contrast to B. the child requires a method for determining what each of these hypotheses implies with respect to each sentence.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
from error correction by adults. (4) This grammar provides the device with a method of interpreting sentences (by virtue of its capacity for internally representing structural information and applying the grammar to sentences). Through this process the device constructs a theory of the language of which the PLD are a sample. a way of representing structural information about them. First proposed by Noam Chomsky. which ‘goes far
. the child comes to know a great deal more than she has ‘learned’. utterances of partial sentences) of that data. an additional method is needed by which the child can select which hypothesis is compatible with the PLD. citing the notion of "infinite use of finite means" proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. the child must have a technique for representing input signals and. Chomsky motivated the LAD hypothesis by what he perceived as intractable complexity of language acquisition.

the language exhibited many of the underlying grammatical features of many other natural languages. had never acquired language. these individuals were unable to learn syntax. the LAD is thought to become unavailable after a certain age — the critical period hypothesis (i. Furthermore. grew up speaking a grammatically rich language -. is subject to maturational constraints). This was taken as powerful evidence for children's innate grammar module.
." and is known as Hawaii Creole English. Bickerton found. The language became "creolized. Chomsky has gradually abandoned the LAD in favour of a parameter-setting model of language acquisition (principles and parameters)." linked together previously evolved traits into full language. Kegl discovered that these children had developed their own.[10] Others like Stephen Pinker argue for a slower evolution over longer periods of time. Debate within the nativist position now revolves around how language evolved. the adults observed that the younger children were using gestures unknown to them to communicate with each other. must hear the song of an adult chaffinch before reaching maturity.[8] More evidence of the innateness of language comes from the deaf population of Nicaragua. Until approximately 1986. they discovered that children past a certain age had difficulty learning any language. As Nicaraguans attempted to rectify the situation.[11] As the chapter by Newport and Gleitman suggests. to help unravel this mystery. despite being raised in otherwise healthy environments. 1994. an American linguist from MIT. Chomsky. While it was possible to teach vocabulary. Young chaffinches. Nicaraguan Sign Language with its own rules of "sign-phonology" and syntax. distinct.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
beyond the presented primary linguistic data and is in no sense an “inductive generalization” from these data’ In some views of language acquisition.neither English nor the syntax-less pidgin of their parents. They invited Judy Kegl.e. Derek Bickerton suggests a single mutation. for example. Additionally.. Nicaragua had neither education nor a formalized sign language for the deaf. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT Press)
the possible existence of a Critical Period for language acquisition is another Nativist argument. or else would never be able to sing. Their children. N. and turned out to be incapable of learning language in any meaningful sense. She also discovered some 300 adults who. a "big bang.[9] Derek Bickerton's (1981) landmark work with Hawaiian pidgin speakers studied immigrant populations where first-generation parents spoke highly-ungrammatical "pidgin English". Critical periods are time frames during which environmental exposure is needed to stimulate an innate trait. the maturation of language circuits during a child's early years may be a driving force underlying the course of language acquisition (Pinker. Chapter 9. then language acquistion must be spurred on by the unfolding of the genome during maturation. Nativists argue that if a Critical Period for language acquisiton exists (see below).

and thickness of the cerebral cortex (gray matter). Similarly. 1967).Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
Bates." Their development often fossilizes into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. Furthermore. Various anthropological studies of other human cultures. of the world's children are not spoken to in a manner akin to traditional language lessons. Before birth. instead sticking to their own ungrammatical preferences. huge numbers of neurons die in utero. especially the phonology. but it is not. like Snow. children often pay scarce attention to what they are told to say.
Criticism and alternative theories
Non-nativist theories include the competition model and social interactionism. Huttenlocher. amount of exposure. Long-distance connections (white matter) are not complete until nine months. and the dying continues during the first two years before leveling off at age seven. brain weight. as well as anecdotal evidence from western families. 1989. if the argument from the poverty of stimulus were indeed an argument about degenerate stimulus. and they continue to grow their speed-inducing myelin insulation throughout childhood. suggests rather that many. and grammar require minimum levels of brain size. but comparable damage in an adult usually leads to permanent aphasia (Curtiss. 1990). The language learning circuitry of the brain is more plastic in childhood. However. and plain talent. Lenneberg. at which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult. quality of teaching. peaking in number between nine months and two years (depending on the brain region). Socialinteractionists. particularly in the language centers of the brain. when the brain's metabolic rate falls back to adult levels. Most adults never master a foreign language. and they migrate into their proper locations in the brain. Locke. Nevertheless. But head size. children learn or recover language when the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged or even surgically removed (though not quite at normal levels). which depend on effort. Thal. & Janowsky. Snow's criticisms might be powerful against Chomsky's argument. but nevertheless grow up to be fully fluent language users. Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine to ten months. or extra synapses. some researchers claim that the empirical data on which theories of social interactionism are based have often been over-representative of middle class American and European parent-child interactions. 1992. The argument from the poverty of stimulus is that there are principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of positive input alone. if not the majority.
. peaking around the age of four. and soon exceeds it. long-distance connections. as any parent knows. Many researchers now take this into account in their analyses. Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence. virtually all the neurons (nerve cells) are formed. where the synapses (junctions) subserving mental computation take place. one can conjecture that these changes are responsible for the decline in the ability to learn a language over the lifespan. Synapses continue to develop. 1992. theorize that adults play an important part in children's language acquisition. continue to increase rapidly in the year after birth. Perhaps linguistic milestones like babbling. In addition. attitudes. There are great individual differences. giving rise to what we call a "foreign accent. first words.

the child is hardly growing up in a nurturing environment. and strict binary branching." An interesting example of this is the case of Genie. The child drew attention because she was undersized for her age and did not speak. might be sufficient for acquisition. She was unable to acquire language completely. Lexical functional grammar. Genie was discovered on 4 November 1970 when her mother entered a social services office to apply for financial aid.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
however complete and grammatical that evidence is. that cannot possibly be acquired from any amount of input. Under such a theory of grammar. He claimed that if no language is learned before then. it could never be learned in a normal and fully functional sense. then it must be innate. Her father had judged her retarded at birth and had chosen to isolate her. the input. The chapter by Newport and Gleitman shows how sheer age seems to play an important role. While all theories of language acquisition posit some degree of innateness. DeKeyser argues that although it is true that there is a critical period. However. an argument against Chomskian views of language acquisition lies in Chomskian theory itself. A different theory of language. A thirteen-year-old victim of lifelong child abuse. although the degree to which she acquired language is disputed. such as movement. She appeared to be entirely without language. Since the theory is. combined with both general and languagespecific learning capacities. this does not mean that adults cannot learn a second language perfectly. College Park instructor Robert DeKeyser. complex underlying structures. and so she had remained until her discovery. The theory has several hypothetical constructs. in essence. however. This was called the "Critical period hypothesis. may yield different conclusions. This argument is not vulnerable to objection based on evidence from interaction studies such as Snow's. a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure and more learning.
Critical Period hypothesis
Main article: Critical Period Hypothesis Linguist Eric Lenneberg stated in 1964 that the crucial period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. It was an ideal (albeit horrifying) opportunity to test the "forbidden experiment" theory that a nurturing environment could somehow make up for a total lack of language past the age of 12. DeKeyser talks about the role of language aptitude as opposed to the critical period. and several varieties of Construction Grammar. unlearnably complex. empty categories.[12] Detractors [attribution needed] of the "Critical Period Hypothesis" say that in this example and others like it (see Feral children).
. also known as "The Wild Child". at least on the syntactic level. and that the lack of language acquisition in later life may be due to the results of a generally abusive environment rather than being specifically due to a lack of exposure to language. A more up-to-date view of the Critical Period Hypothesis is represented by the University of Maryland. Examples of alternative theories that do not utilize movement and empty categories are Head-driven phrase structure grammar. It was discovered through questioning the mother that Genie was daily strapped to a potty chair and wore diapers when strapped into her bed each night.

Children's two-word combinations are highly similar across cultures. are plausible causes. Airplane allgone. Hi Calico. Papa away. Pinker. like hot. Our car. this one-word stage can last from two months to a year. No pee. Dry pants. vehicles (car. allgone. Children differ in how much they name objects or engage in social interaction using memorized routines. I shut. et al. eat. comment on people doing things
.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
Successful acquisition of language typically happens by 4 (as we shall see in the next section). baby). and people (dada. is guaranteed for children up to the age of six. Children's first words are similar all over the planet. like yes. Ingram. and begins. Papa away. and is rare thereafter. Mail come. and go. I sit. 1993. bye-bye. sock). light. Around 18 months. such as the decline in metabolic rate and number of neurons during the early school age years. About half the words are for objects: food (juice. so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. with two-word strings like the following:
All dry. All messy. with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns. no. Words are usually produced in isolation. open. logically enough. nose). There are words for actions. and move about. babies achieve these feats before they produce or understand words. More cereal. Interestingly. is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty. they start to produce them (see Clark. and routines. clothing (diaper.. because they have learned neither word.a few of which. dirty. though all children do both. more. motions. The module can then serve as the front end of the system that learns words and grammar. Bybebye car. 1993. babies begin to understand words. and around that birthday. peekaboo. And primitive syntax begins. they cannot be listening for the difference in sound between a word they think means bit and a word they think means beet. and hi -. language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan. and cold. See pretty. children announce when objects appear. Maturational changes in the brain. kitty). See baby. though they are not single words for the adult. body parts (eye. off. All wet. and the bottoming out of the number of synapses and metabolic rate around puberty. The main linguistic accomplishments during the first year of life are control of the speech musculature and sensitivity to the phonetic distinctions used in the parents' language. point out their properties and owners. block). That is. are words in the sense of memorized chunks. toys (doll. Everywhere. animals (dog. want. They must be sorting the sounds directly. somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language (Kuhl. language changes in two ways. like look at that and what is that. Shortly before their first birthday. Other pocket. More hot. like (up. 1994). 1992). Siren by. 1989). Dry pants. there may be a neurologically-determined "critical period" for successful language acquisition.
Our car. No bed. there are routines used in social interaction. analogous to the critical periods documented in visual development in mammals and in the acquisition of songs by some birds. Vocabulary growth increases. Boot off. and modifiers. boat). As the chapter by Werker shows. household items (bottle. disappear. and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence (Clark. cookie. the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours. Finally. Thus.

and object. 1984). I got horn.3: Play checkers. 235. what. pumpkin. noted that although the three children he studied intensively never produced a sentence as complicated as Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen. Bloom.) The children must have understood the meaning of the ordering of subject. and in the correct order: (Brown. Limber. Pinker. Pinker. horsie. babies who spoke only in single words were seated in front of two television screens. 1994a): 2. 1989. 1984). 1973. window. Children's output seems to meet up with a bottleneck at the output end (Brown. doggie paper. the other showed Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster.and three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea. "OH LOOK!!! BIG BIRD IS TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!! FIND BIG BIRD TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!!" (Or vice-versa. and ask about who. Their two. Even before they put words together. the words are properly ordered (Braine. Pinker. doubling every month. 1973. Brown. table. children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
and seeing things. For example. 1984. and because grammar is a combinatorial system. floor. 1970. babies can comprehend a sentence using its syntax. Roger Brown. reaching the thousands before the third birthday (Ingram. reject and request objects and activities. Put Put ride go Give Put put doggie. in the year following his first word combinations at the age of 2 years and 3 months (Pinker. 1973. Sentence length increases steadily.
. Recipient Object John lunch Location in the kitchen. 1973. 205):
Agent (Mother Mommy Mommy Baby Give I Tractor Adam Action gave fix. verb. 1973. Brown. the number of syntactic types increases exponentially. Adam.)
Between the late two's and mid-three's. one of the founders of the modern study of language development. 2. One screen showed Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird. 1989). These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them. p. Ingram. For example. 1976. A voice-over said. truck it floor. here are snapshots of the development of one of Brown's longitudinal subjects. p. light.4: See marching bear go? Screw part machine. each of which featured a pair of adults dressed up as Cookie Monster and Big Bird from Sesame Street. in one experiment. 1991). because they looked more at the screen that depicted the sentence in the voiceover (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff. and where. they did produce strings containing all of its components. box. Big drum. and no one has worked out the exact sequence.

complements.6: Write a piece a paper.see.questions with words like who. What that egg doing? No. I gon' make it like a rocket to blast off with. and -s. 2. the.
. During the grammar explosion. The earlier sentences resembled telegrams. Rintintin don't fly. negations. what and where. as well as inflections like -ed. comparatives. 3. missing unstressed function words like of.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
2.11: Do want some pie on your face? Why you mixing baby chocolate? I said why not you coming in? We going turn light on so you can't . 2. 3.keep the screwdriver just like a carpenter keep the screwdriver? Normal children can differ by a year or more in their rate of language development. I going wear that to wedding.1: I like to play with something else. How tiger be so healthy and fly like kite? Joshua throw like a penguin. children's sentences are getting not only longer but more complex. because the children can embed one constituent inside another.it. Adam's language development. Mommy. of the grammatical machinery needed to account for adult grammar. You know how to put it back together. though the stages they pass through are generally the same regardless of how stretched out or compressed. These constructions appear to display the most. Do you want little bit.8: Let me get down with the boots on. Cromer? 2. Those are not strong mens. and does.9: Where Mommy keep her pocket book? Show you something funny.5: Now put boots on. 2. perhaps even all. with the two-branch NP embedded inside the three-branch VP. sir. children are using these function words more often than they are omitting them. on. many children speak in complex sentences before they turn two. was relatively leisurely. with fuller trees.to give me some carrots and some beans? Press the button and catch . A full range of sentence types flower -. they now say Give big doggie paper. Why you put the pacifier in his mouth? 3. relative clauses. You dress me up like a baby elephant.0: I going come in fourteen minutes. I'm going to mail this so the letter can't come off.7: Where piece a paper go? Dropped a rubber band. conjunctions. 2.10: Look at that train Ursula brought. You don't have paper.2: So it can't be cleaned? I broke my racing car. By the 3's. -ing. I don't want to sit seat. many in more than 90% of the sentences that require them. I . and passives.want to have some espresso. You want . Where wrench go? What that paper clip doing? 2. Whereas before they might have said Give doggie paper (a threebranch Verb Phrase) and Big doggie (a two-branch Noun Phrase). for example. Do you know the light wents off? When it's got a flat tire it's need a go to the station. Can I put my head in the mailbox so the mailman can know where I are and put me in the mailbox? Can I .

As we have seen. The next chapter follows one of those errors in detail. and Going to see kitten. predominantly used in written language.attained by the learner. the child is on target. make few errors. Learnability theory has defined learning as a scenario involving four parts (the theory embraces all forms of learning. Crain. or they might have some special properties: they might be ordered in certain ways. Even grammatical gender.. know . One of them is the "target" language. This is the information in the world that the learner has to go on in trying to acquire the language. and so on. German. When researchers focus on a single grammatical rule and count how often a child obeys it and how often he or she versus flouts it. 1983). the target . Marcus. 3. it might include the sentences parents utter. 1992).which it is. rich systems of case and agreement. with no lag relative to their English-speaking counterparts. Osherson. That's a furniture. 1979). et al. For children. strings of agglutinated suffixes. SOV and VSO orders. A class of languages. it would be puzzling how any kind of language could survive if children did not easily learn it!). ergative case marking. more than 90% of the time. Children do not seem to favor any particular kind of language (indeed. In the case of children. Can you broke those?. 1985. which many adults learning a second language find mystifying. come to supply most inflections and function words in sentences that require them. & Weinstein. to be . A learning strategy. but I will use language as the example): 1.1% to 8% of the opportunities for making them. Pinker. What he can ride in?.consist of the existing and possible human languages. feedback to the child (verbal or nonverbal) in response to the child's own speech. Though our ears perk up when we hear errors like mens. Parental utterances can be a random sample of the language. in principle? A branch of theoretical computer science called Learnability Theory attempts to answer this question (Gold. it is
. sentences might be repeated or only uttered once. Pinker.language is the one spoken in their community. by the age of three. 1967. In the case of children. the errors occur in anywhere from 0. 1992.
1 Learnability Theory
What is language acquisition. 1989. The learning strategy is the algorithm that creates the hypotheses and determines whether they are consistent with the input information from the environment. and whatever else their language throws at them. presents no problem: children acquiring language like French. using information in the environment. but the learner does not. An environment. or mentally taxing even to an adult (like The horse that the elephant tickled kissed the pig). the results are very impressive: for just about every rule that has been looked at. It is safe to say that except for constructions that are rare. wents. They swiftly acquire free word order. all parts of all languages are acquired before the child turns four (Slobin. 1984. Stob. children rarely scramble word orders and. of course. 1985/1992).Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
Though many of the young 3-year-old's sentences are ungrammatical for one reason or another. tries out "hypotheses" about the target language. it is because there are many things that can go wrong in any single sentence. the context in which they utter them. and Hebrew acquire gender marking quickly. The learner. and never use the association with maleness and femaleness as a false criterion (Levy. and so on. Button me the rest. 2. 1990. three-year olds obey it a majority of the time (Stromswold. the class of languages would .

they learn whichever language they are exposed to. on logical grounds alone. or information about which strings of words are not sentences in the language to be acquired. 1994). of course. The term "positive evidence" refers to the information available to the child about which strings of words are grammatical sentences of the target language. often in a single generation. expressive "creoles" with their own complex grammars (Bickerton.way to the target language.they may arrive at an approximation to it. Children with Japanese genes do not find Japanese any easier than English.set of hypotheses one of which is correct. such as Victor.identical to the target language after some fixed period of time. as long as they are in a community with other children. Children who grew up in plantations and slave colonies were often exposed to a crude pidgin that served as the lingua franca in these Babels of laborers. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are. is so hard. and have some source for individual words. Children do not. the Wild Boy of Aveyron (subject of a film by Francois Truffaut). Human children might get such information by being corrected every time they speak ungrammatically. they will invent one on their own. . Kegl. see also the Chapter by Newport and Gleitman). The sign languages of the deaf arose in similar ways.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
the "grammar-forming" mechanism in their brains. It is not hard to show why learning a language. A success criterion.
Positive Evidence
Children clearly need some kind of linguistic input to acquire a language. they may waiver among a . There have been occasional cases in history where abandoned children have somehow survived in forests. need to hear a full-fledged language. or vice-versa.but that by some time the hypotheses are related in some systematic .the acquisition problem is all the harder. If we want to say that "learning" occurs. however. A key factor is the role of negative evidence. their "language acquisition device. when found. Theorems in learnability theory show how assumptions about any of the three components imposes logical constraints on the fourth.and as we shall see." 4. Children most definitely do need to hear an existing language to learn that language. they are too schematic to generate concrete speech. presumably it is because the learners' hypotheses are not random. If they aren't -. they arise spontaneously and quickly wherever there is a community of deaf children (Senghas. the chapter by Newport and Gleitman discuss some of those cases. But they grew up to speak genuinely new languages. Occasionally other modern children have grown up wild because depraved parents have raised them silently in dark rooms and attics. there are an infinite number of hypotheses consistent with any finite sample of environmental information. Learnability theory shows which induction problems are solvable and which are not. Indeed. and grammatical constructions on their own. they probably aren't -. words. . are mute. 1984. The outcome is always the same: the children. Like all "induction problems" (uncertain generalizations from instances). 1994. Learners may arrive at a hypothesis .
.

Indeed. She walking. 1967." such as rural American English (e. the vast majority of the speech they hear during the language-learning years is fluent. count as grammatical. them books.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
By "grammatical.2 Negative Evidence
Negative evidence refers to information about which strings of words are not grammatical sentences in the language. every human language system that has been studied -is intricately complex. because in the absence of negative evidence. the grammar of casual British English allows you to answer the question Will he go? by saying He might do. 1994a). are as logical. Ellipsis is not just random snipping from sentences. Using transcripts of naturalistic parent-child dialogue. Note that his is true even for forms of English that people unthinkingly call "ungrammatical. as rulegoverned as the southern-England dialect of English that. expressive. 1989). often more so. and grammatically well-formed: 99. see Pinker. and precise as "correct" written English. He be working. negative evidence." do we find that parents' speech counts as "positive evidence"? That is. slang. or don't use. complete. see the Chapter by Labov). dangling participles. are "grammatical" in this sense (and indeed.. As mentioned in Section ). they drug him away) and urban black English (e.indeed. elliptical utterances. such as corrections or other forms of feedback from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical. but is governed by rules that are part of the grammar of one's language or dialect. systematic. & Gleitman. he don't. Scientifically speaking. 1979. slips of the tongue. according to one estimate (Newport. F. it's very important for us to know whether children get and need negative. the grammar of working-class speech -. Given this scientific definition of "grammatical. we ain't. such as when the question Where are you going? is answered with To the store). and so on. they must have some mechanism that either avoids generating too large a language the child would be conservative -.g." incidentally. These are not corrupted versions of standard English. whereas the grammar of American English doesn't allow it.. this is true of conversation among adults in general (Labov. Skinner's behaviorist claim that language learning depends on parents' reinforcement of children's grammatical behaviors. 1969). 1977). can the child assume that it is part of the language to be learned. any child who hypothesizes a rule that generates a superset of the language will have no way of knowing that he or she is wrong Gold. hesitations. for historical reasons. Thus language acquisition is ordinarily driven by a grammatical sample of the target language." "fractured. If children don't get." or "bad English. Thus split infinitives.
6. For example. when a parent uses a sentence.g. linguists and psycholinguists mean only those sentences that sound natural in colloquial speech. Similarly.or that can recover from such overgeneration. not necessarily those that would be deemed "proper English" in formal written prose. Gleitman. or do parents use so many ungrammatical sentences random fragments. and false starts that the child would have to take much of it with a grain of salt? Fortunately for the child.93%. they divided children's sentences into ones that were grammatically well-formed and ones
. Roger Brown and Camille Hanlon (1970) attempted to test B. though different languages are complex in different ways. Pinker. became the standard several centuries ago. to a linguist they look just like different dialects.

Hirsh-Pasek. low legato murmurs for comforting. But Marcus (1993) has found that these patterns fall far short of negative evidence (reliable information about the grammatical status of any word string).Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
that contained grammatical errors. and Schneiderman. Treiman. though of profound importance. and whether parents seemed to answer them appropriately. These results. for unknown neurological reasons. that's good") and those that expressed some kind of disapproval. Bohannon & Stanowicz. whether the parent repeats the sentence verbatim. The boy's abilities show that children certainly do not need negative evidence to learn grammatical rules properly. nor is it in a monotone like science-fiction robots. or with non sequiturs. asks a followup question. but failed to find one: parents did not differentially express approval or disapproval to their children contingent on whether the child's prior utterance was well-formed or not (approval depends. Other studies (e. because the parent's reaction is only statistical: the feedback signals given to ungrammatical signals are also given nearly as often to grammatical sentences. Every speaker of English judges sentences such as I dribbled the floor with paint and Ten pounds was weighed by the boy and Who do you believe the claim that John saw? and John asked Mary to look at himself to be ungrammatical. Stromswold (1994) has an even more dramatic demonstration that parental feedback cannot be crucial. a set of sharp staccato bursts for prohibiting. Demetras. Penner. should not be too surprising. But it is unlikely that every such speaker has at some point uttered these sentences and benefited from negative feedback. timing. a rise pattern for directing attention. exaggerated prosody of its own: a rise and fall contour for approving. instead. and stress called prosody. for example. on whether the child's utterance was true). as if they understood them. Post. even in the unlikely event that their parents provided it..g. Even when a parent does react differentially. Fernald (1992) has shown that these
.leaving a given child unable to know what to make of any parental reaction. Normal human speech has a pattern of melody. and smooth. and to judge accurately whether a sentence was grammatical or ungrammatical. 1988) have replicated that result. And motherese directed to young infants has a characteristic. 1984. They then divided adults' responses to those sentences into ones that expressed some kind of approval (e. though. 1986.g. and many forms of ungrammaticality are not reacted to at all -. "yes. was congenitally unable to talk. They found parents do not understand their children's well-formed questions better than their badly-formed ones. verbatim.
Prosody
Parental speech is not a string of printed words on a ticker-tape. He was a good listener. hundreds of times to eliminate the error. and when tested he was able to understand complicated sentences perfectly. The child must have some mental mechanisms that rule out vast numbers of "reasonable" strings of words without any outside intervention. Different parents react in opposite ways to their children's ungrammatical sentences. or changes the topic. 1987. Some have found small statistical contingencies between the grammaticality of some children's sentence and the kind of follow-up given by their parents. Brown and Hanlon also looked at children's well-formed and badly-formed questions. a child would have to repeat a particular error. and Snow. She studied a child who. They looked for a correlation. but with a twist.

When given a choice. a number of prosodic properties of the speech wave. to begin with. Hirsh-Pasek. 1982. Nelson.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
patterns are very widespread across language communities. Just listen to how you would say the word like in the sentence The boy I like slept compared to The boy I saw likes sleds. people tend to eat apples. 1980). 1982. In fact. 1987). Gleitman & Wanner. In all speech. before children have learned syntax. it can't be by simple temporal contiguity. Blind children. exaggerated in intonation. Druss. and imperatives. and might distinguish statements. are influenced by the syntactic structure of the sentence (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper. who tend to talk about the here and now in the presence of children. they know the meaning of many words. children rarely if ever learn language from television. Wexler & Culicover. That is. 1990) have suggested that children use this information in the reverse direction. and surely don't. 1977). such as lengthening. what was being said (Slobin.5 Context
Children do not hear sentences in isolation. 1972. it would be difficult for a child to figure out what the characters in the unresponsive televised worlds are talking about. uniformly in intonation. Many models of language acquisition assume that the input to the child consists of a sentence and a representation of the meaning of that sentence. but not vice-versa). delineate major sentence boundaries. Schlesinger.. In the first sentence. Ervin-Tripp (1973) studied hearing children of deaf parents whose only access to English was from radio or television broadcasts. and pausing. inferred from context and from the child's knowledge of the meanings of the words (e. Jusczyk. No child has learned language from the radio. 1986. 1992. We will examine the hypothesis in Section . 1985). 1971). and is run together with the following word. indeed. 1984. The children did not learn any speech from that input. only the words themselves. For example. 1977.
6. can infer from transcripts. 1984. and may be universal.g. and read the syntactic structure of a sentence directly off its melody and timing. whose access to the nonlinguistic world is obviously severely limited. Cassidy. And when children do succeed in guessing a parent's meaning. & Kennedy.g. babies prefer to listen to speech with these properties than to speech intended for adults (Fernald. Of course. intonation. The melodies seem to attract the child's attention. questions. perceive the entire meaning of a sentence from context. Anderson. guessing what the speaker might have meant (Macnamara. this can't literally be true -. and they might be able to make good guesses as to what their parents are saying based on their knowledge of how the referents of these words typically act (for example. One reason is that without already knowing the language. it is in the middle of a verb phrase and is pronounced more quickly. 1984. in the second. and followed by a pause. Gleitman. mark the sounds as speech as opposed to stomach growlings or other noises. Berwick. learn language without many problems (Landau & Gleitman. the word like is at the boundary of a relative clause and is drawn out. and highlight new words. Some psychologists (e. but in a context. 1980). the child can be more of a mind-reader. Gleitman (1990) points out that when a mother arriving home from work
. In interacting with live human speakers.children don't hear every word of every sentence. parental speech to young children is so redundant with its context that a person with no knowledge of the order in which parents' words are spoken. Pinker. with high accuracy.

Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
opens the door. The regular rules of inflectional morphology are examples of Level 3 rules. Kiparsky showed that words are built in layers or "levels. and inflectional affixes that modify a word according to its role in the sentence. judging by their spontaneous speech. they just add material onto the word. if there are derivational affixes that build new words out of old ones. Level 2 rules apply to a word after any Level 1 rules have been applied. and certainly not when the child is already eating peas. there is a rule adding the suffix -ian. Still. yielding. For example. we can't just rely on what they say. created by mental faculties for perceiving objects and events and the states of mind and communicative intentions of other humans." to yield a more complex word. can affect the sound of the stem. she is likely to say. the assumption of context-derived semantic input is a reasonable idealization. then the derivational affix appears inside the inflectional one: Darwinisms is possible. to infer what the parent probably meant. This and many other grammatical quirks were nicely explained in a theory of word structure proposed by Paul Kiparsky (1982).) Finally. Then you can rules of a certain kind to it. plus the meanings of any familiar words in the sentence." not I'm opening the door. If they did. Darwinsism is not. Similarly. Earlier I mentioned that in all languages. Level 2 rules generally do not affect the pronunciation of the words they apply to. "What did you do today?." To build a word. Darwinism. for example. Let's look at two examples that illustrate how even very young children seem to obey the innate complex design of Universal Grammar. To show that young children really have grasped the design plan of language. we need to use clever experimental techniques. An example is the rule that
. the syllable carrying the stress shifts from Dar to win. -ed. rather than merely approximating it with outwardly-convincing routines or rules of thumb which would have to be supplanted later in life. and in a short period of time. And remember that. if one considers the abilities of the whole child. (The stress in Darwinism is the same as it was in Darwin. leaving the pronunciation intact. The child can use this knowledge. In Section we will discuss how children might fill the important gaps in what they can infer from context. But in any generation. the differences between parents' language and the one their children ultimately acquire is small. according to the theory. The child must keep an updated mental model of the current situation. she is likely to say "Eat your peas" when her child is. and -ing. in most times. Level 3 rules apply to a word after any Level 2 rules have been applied.
7 What and When Children Learn
People do not reproduce their parents' language exactly. -er. you can start with a root (like Darwin). and -able. It seems that the success criterion for human language is something close to full mastery. we would all still be speaking like Chaucer. turning the word into Darwinian. like -ism. called "Level 1 Rules. looking at the dog. An example of a Level 2 rule is the one that adds the suffix -ism. in this case. we can conclude that most children have mastered their mother tongue (allowing for performance errors due to complexity or rarity of a construction) some time in their threes. Level 1 Rules. like -s. say.

to decipher the syntax of the sentence. because it itself is one of the things that has to be learned. 1987. and drops in fundamental frequency. Similarly. in John pleased Mary it is an object of experience. 1994b. For example.for example. 1984. is consistent in different ways in different languages. Darwinians or Darwinisms. syntactic structure affects aspects of prosody. In John liked Mary the subject is an "experiencer". Even phrase structure configurations have semantic correlates: arguments of verbs reliably appear as "sisters" to them inside the verb phrase in phrase structure trees (see the chapter by Lasnik). because prosodic properties are perceptible in advance of knowing any syntax. The effects of emotional state of the speaker. Macnamara. 1982. pausing. in press). in John received a package it is a goal or recipient. 1982. the main pause is at the more embedded boundary between the verb and its object. Just as gold glitters. entities directly affected by an action are expressed as objects (but not all objects are entities affected by an action). But on closer examination. so at first glance prosody seems like a straightforward way for a child to break into the language system.) Similarly.
. the proposal does not seem to work (Pinker. The proposal seems attractive. are all mixed together. but aspects of prosody are affected by many things besides syntax. Worse. But a child cannot work backwards and assume that the main pause in an input sentence marks the boundary between the subject and the predicate. this does not work in reverse: the subject is not necessarily an agent. Though not all nouns are physical objects. Wexler & Culicover. and syllabic structure of individual words. 1989.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
adds an -s to the end of a noun to form its plural -. and to posit phrase boundaries at points in the acoustic stream marked by lengthening. then that argument will be expressed as the subject of basic sentences in language after language. Bloom. at least not at the very beginning of language acquisition. In the similar sentence He ate the slug. word frequency.
Using Context and Semantics
A third possibility (see Pinker. Fernald and McRoberts. (Again.
Using Prosody
A second way in which the child could begin syntax learning would be to attend to the prosody of sentences. even when it is consistent. Steedman. if a verb has an argument playing the semantic role of 'agent'. 1980. the mapping between syntax and prosody. in John underwent an operation it is a patient. contrastive stress. the main pause coincides with the major syntactic boundary between the subject and the predicate. and there is no way for a child to disentangle them from the sound wave alone. Grimshaw 1981. in press. but all that glitters is not gold. So a young child cannot use any such consistency. in the sentence The baby ate the slug. intent of the speaker. in press) exploits the fact that there is a one-way contingency between syntax and semantics in the basic sentences of most of the world's languages. all physical objects are named by nouns. actions themselves are expressed as verbs (though not all verbs express actions).

and so on). phrases can have subjects. they could use semantic properties of words and phrases (inferred from context. We have already seen where such constraints could come. because they are in subject position.
. ten hours a day. Of course. Talk to the dog. children cannot attack the language learning task like some logician free of preconceptions. Second. English allows at least eight possible phrasemates of a head noun inside a noun phrase. and so on. First. But by unconsciously labeling all nouns as "N" and all noun phrases as "NP. the child can deduce that in English the subject comes before the verb. dogs that I like. a child can infer that a word that designated a person. Man bites dog." This would leave the child no way of knowing how to order the words in sentences such as Apples appeal to Mary or John received a package. In turn. big dogs. Bootstrapping What does it mean to look for phrases? A phrase is a group of words. and the millions of possible combinations fall out automatically. upon hearing the sentence The cat chased the rat. X-bars are grouped with their modifiers inside large phrases (Noun Phrase.. place or thing is a noun. that the object comes after the verb. but the child." the child has only to hear about twenty-five different kinds of noun phrase and learn the nouns one by one. But once an initial set of rules is learned. For example. the child could use the meanings to help set up the right phrase structure. and that John is the subject of receive. Give the boy a dog. Similarly. 1991. More generally. see Section ) as evidence that they belong to certain syntactic categories. dogs in the park. it would take over a century. they need prior constraints. For example. that a word expressing the agent argument of an action predicate is the subject of its sentence. the child could now infer that Apples is the subject of appeal. and so on. a fact the child now knows thanks to the earlier cat-chased-rat sentences. that a word designating an action is a verb. arguments are grouped with heads in small phrases.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
If children assume that semantic and syntactic categories are related in restricted ways in the early input.000 different nouns (Miller. the child could infer that appeal is a verb to begin with because it is in the "verb" position. If children had to learn all the combinations separately. That is. and so on. they would need to listen to about 140 million different sentences. the child could assume that parents' speech respects the basic design of human phrase structure: phrases contain heads (e. has no way of knowing this. 1994a). Pinker. Most of the logically possible groups of words in a sentence are useless for constructing new sentences. items that are more abstract or that don't follow the usual patterns relating syntax and semantic could be learned through their distribution in already-learned structures. such as John's dog. a noun phrase is built around a head noun). sometimes called X-bars (see the chapter by Lasnik). There are three ways to inflect a noun: dog. A dog's life. a child cannot literally create a grammar that contains rules like "Agent words come before action words. Verb Phrase. and so on. unable to rely on parental feedback. So once again.g. And a typical child by the time he or she is in high school has learned something like 20. dog's. such as Dog bites man. such as wears bothers and cheering too. This would give the child the basis for creating the phrase structure trees that allow him or her to analyze the rules of the language. dogs. At a rate of a sentence every ten seconds. since the meanings of parents' sentences are guessable in context. there are about eight places in a sentence where the whole noun phrase can go.

the speech of children. We cannot design new ones with independent properties. In 1861 he discovered that injury to the front part of the left brain hemisphere (now called Broca's area) resulted in speech loss. then. Children. Aphasia . laboured speech and disturbed word order. Broca . When we have. while similar injuries to the right side did not. naturalistic and experimental child psychology. perceptual. philosophy of induction. the vocal organs remaining intact. Broca's patients have speech deficiencies characterized by loss of function words. too.Linguist Eric Lenneberg (1964) stated that the crucial period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
Conclusion The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind."
. Given these problems. but we have. is endlessly fascinating. and the intelligence being preserved. were not designed for the benefit of psychologists: their cognitive. cognitive psychology. linguistic theory. He claimed that if no language is learned before then. Children with damage to the left brain hemisphere show deficiency in learning language. resulting from damage to the brain caused by injury or disease. word-finding pauses. we are stuck with the confounded ones entrenched in communities. and none of their behavior reflects one of these components acting in isolation.
Glossary
Anomia . or of the appropriate use of words. and motor skills are all developing at the same time as their linguistic systems are maturing and their knowledge of a particular language is increasing. Critical Period Hypothesis. it could never be learned in a normal and fully functional sense. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration.inability to name objects or to recognize written or spoken names of objects. It is dependent on injury or disease of the brain. it is only because a diverse set of conceptual and methodological tools has been used to trap the elusive answers to our questions: neurobiology. Languages are complex combinations of elegant principles and historical accidents. This was called the "Critical period Hypothesis. Language acquisition.Paul Broca related language specifically to the left side of the brain. loss of the power of speech. it may be surprising that we have learned anything about language acquisition at all. ethology. social.Partial or total loss of the ability to articulate ideas or comprehend spoken or written language. is one of the best examples of the indispensability of the multidisciplinary approach called cognitive science. Maturation Theory . while those with right brain injuries learn language normally. theoretical and applied computer science. I believe. and its subject matter.

Nouns. prepositions and pronouns. Phonology . Prosody ." Empiricism . the study of language meaning.The study of speech sounds in language or a language with reference to their distribution and patterning and to tacit rules governing pronunciation. See "Content Words. the pattern of formation of sentences or phrases in a language. derivation. qualities and circumstances. Morphology . Phoneme .A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word. Syntax . and the formation of compounds. the grammatical arrangement of words in sente nces. such as -ed in walked.
. modifications. including inflection."
Intonation . See "Function Words.grammatical words like conjunctions.Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
Content Words .The view that experience. including the various distinctions. and combinations of tones. the doctrine of innate ideas. or a word element.That part of grammar which treats of the quantity of syllables. such as man.The study of the structure and form of words in language or a language. Semantics . the patterns of stress and intonation in a language. or that the mind possesses forms of thought independent of sensation. the science or doctrine of the elementary sounds uttered by the human voice in speech. as the m of mat and the b of bat in English. the admissible arrangement of sounds in words.The doctrine that the mind produces ideas that are not derived from external sources. that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.The use of changing pitch to convey syntactic information. or other language form. minimal meaningful language unit. Function Words . Nativism .The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning. of accent. the doctrine that knowledge derives from experience.The study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences. verbs and adjectives that refer to entities. events.The meaning or the interpretation of a word.. is the only source of knowledge. sentence. one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language. also called closed class words because new words are rarely added to this class. rise and fall of the voice pitch Morpheme . also called open class words because new words are continually being added to this class. especially of the senses. and of the laws of versification or metrical composition.

In 1874 Carle Wernicke described a similar type of aphasia with patients who have suffered injuries in the back part of the left hemisphere (now Wernicke's area).Go Higher Arts Introduction to Language
Wernicke . We all occasionally have difficulty trying to remember the correct word that may be "on the tip of your tongue.
. Some people with Wernicke's aphasia suffer from the inability to find the correct words. use nonsense words and jargon. Wernicke's patients spoke fluently. but tended to substitute words. with good intonation and pronunciation." but aphasics that suffer from Anomia have a much more serious problem trying to produce the correct words.